I’m currently spending a lot of time working with custom actions, removing them where I can and improving them where they’re still necessary. The biggest change I’m making is to make the custom actions data driven using the immediate/deferred/rollback custom action triad. One of the advantages in doing so is that I can use Lux [...]
The Cambridge-based WiX East Virtual Team have is pleased to announce its first major contribution to WiX: The Lux unit-testing framework. Lux will be available in the next weekly release of WiX v3.5. Unit-testing custom actions with Lux Custom actions are a frequent cause of installation failures so it’s important to test them thoroughly. Custom [...]
WcaUtil is a static library of convenience functions for writing custom actions in native C++. One of the more useful functions is WcaLog, which writes messages into the Windows Installer log. The first argument to WcaLog is the level of the message: LOGMSG_TRACEONLY: Written to the log only in debug builds for debugging custom actions. [...]
When you include deferred custom actions — that somehow modify the machine — in your setup, you have two big responsibilities: Provide rollback custom actions that "undo" what the deferred CAs do so that the installation transaction is actually transactional. Test. Test. Test. OK, so numbers 2 through 4 are kinda the same but not [...]
Google announced the release of Google Earth 4.3 today. Given the recent release of their WiX-based setup for the Google App Engine SDK, I had to give it a shot. (It helps that my day job also deals with 3-D terrain imagery.) When you click the link to “Download Google Earth 4.3” (and accept the [...]